Truth and Justice in “Anil’s Ghost” by Michael Ondaatje

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The action οf nineteenth-century novels begins upon the common ground: a security οf types, places, dealings, and values. Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, whose terrible battle to force justice into being rent his family and his world, is a decent, law-abiding salesman οf horses. Melville’s narrator, the lawyer who employs Bartleby, is an unambiguous, comfort-loving Wall Street type. Often, the safety surrounding strangeness is so safe that one οf the tasks οf the fiction is to push us off into a distress οf interpretation. As readers, we are a bit like Louis the Fourteenth in C. F. Meyer’s short novel Sufferings οf a Boy. Louis has just chosen a new confessor, and his old physician, Fagon, narrates to him the sufferings this confessor once inflicted on a simple boy. Fagon wants his story to alert the king to the baleful influence the confessor will exercise and the harm it will do the nation. Louis listens with pleasure, is entertained, even moved. But nothing more. The telling has only nature οf fiction: it is beside the real point οf life. The king’s complacency and his choice remain. And we as readers share the exemption: our order will not be much threatened by fiction. (Gordimer, pp. 9-10) For reading, indeed, in order. It allows the imagination to play with deconstructing horrors. It tames its subjects. By their nature, stories imply names for disorder: chance, fate, Gothic, something out there. And the impact οf disorder is suspended.

All art, οf course, demands suspension οf disbelief, οf belief. Whether or not a frame or a telling intervenes, the act οf reading is a frame. It mediates, triangulates, distances. Stories, E. M. Forster lamented, must occupy time; but the exemptions associated with reading are now a more pressing concern. This point, too, is commonplace. Yet its conventionality becomes in much major recent fiction a point οf departure. It becomes a launching platform for postmodernisms: for the disappearance οf actions into their parodies; for styles that lead their lives, like some cave insects, far from mimetic lights; for techniques that go round in circles rather than forward as lines οf meaning; for words and conceits that confound signifiers and signifieds, vehicles and tenors. None οf the three short novels I touch on accepts the death οf traditional reading or the destiny οf self-enclosed texts. Yet the frightening fascination οf post-modern freedoms beckons much in the manner οf the siren yells Marlow hears from the Congo banks and the easeful all-and-nothing οf Aschenbach’s sea. The slippage οf the ties that hold texts to meanings is a prime quality οf the ancient wooden slips discovered by the Magistrate who narrates Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians:

I look at the lines οf characters written by a stranger long since dead. I do not even know whether to read from right to left or from left to right…. I isolated over four hundred different characters in the script…. I have no idea what they stand for. Does each stand for a single thing, a circle for the sun, and a triangle for a woman?… Does each sign represent a different state οf the tongue, the lips, the throat, the lungs, as they combine in the uttering οf some multifarious unimaginable extinct barbarian language? Or are my four hundred characters nothing but scribal embellishments οf an underlying repertory οf twenty or thirty whose primitive forms I am too stupid to see?

Coetzee is a linguist, well aware οf the divorce between information and meaning that fits into chaos theories. But the Magistrate lives in a fiction in which meaning is a necessity οf being. The deciphering οf the slips begins as a pastime. But the bemusement becomes desperate when the empire’s torturing officers demand a translation, convinced that the Magistrate is using the slips as a code to communicate with the barbarians. Inert characters must be made to perform: to be messages or allegories. The Magistrate’s inventions almost parody Scheherazade’s life-preserving tales. But here, truth falls victim to the story, and the story is betrayed by truth. There is no necessary meaning, except in the facts οf pain. Information exists, but only randomly–as perhaps the barbarians are random, perhaps the Magistrate as well. The Magistrate assembles and reassembles historical, political, and sexual data in the hope οf pattern. He tries to defeat randomness by defining his meaning as resistance to the empire, much as Quentin Compson tries to defeat time by defining himself as incestuous. But empire’s colonel tells him: “You want to go down in history as a martyr, I suspect. But who is going to put you in the history books? These border troubles are οf no significance…. People are not interested in the history οf the back οf the beyond”. To be sure, we are interested; Coetzee’s mastery masters us. A tradition οf literary power (as wielded by Kafka, Beckett, Dino Buzzati, and others) compounds with our abomination οf a vile politics and the narrator’s outraged selfhood to ensure the reader’s stake. Scenes, facts, ideas, and pains grip us. But the meaning is opaque. Perhaps, as Michael Moses argues and deplores, there are hints οf prelapsarian possibility. Yet the experience οf reading is much like the questioning οf the slips: untranslatable information.

By including the slips and speculations about them, Coetzee opens a way to uncertainty. The history, value, and culture once announced by reading are blurred. And there is worse. The Magistrate transfers his investigations to the wounded body οf a barbarian woman. He leaves, manipulates, trying to inscribe himself and to read her. “It has been growing more and more clear to me that until the marks on the girl’s body are deciphered and understood, I cannot let go οf her. Between thumb and forefinger, I part her eyelids. The caterpillar [the wound’s shape] comes to an end, decapitated, at the pink inner rim οf the eyelid. There is no other mark. The eye is whole”. The girl submits to the Magistrate’s attention, but not to his understanding: she is within reach but beyond interpretation. The motifs overlap. The lashing οf the word “ENEMY” into the flesh οf captive barbarians – which Moses connects to the terrible engraving οf texts in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”- is rephrased in the reading οf the girl. And it is hard to avoid an implication that our reading – οf the girl, the Magistrate, the book–may involve some distantly similar act οf imposition. Just as the Magistrate parodies, imitates, and seeks to foil the empire’s inquisition, so do we gaze, question, and seek control over the text.

Michael Ondaatje takes the A-train to work. It’s a half-hour ride from his Soho loft to Harlem, where he’s spending three months as a writer in residence, teaching literature to medical students at Columbia University’s Presbyterian Hospital. “Ten years ago, this was the most dangerous corner on the eastern seaboard,” he says, crossing Broadway and 165th Street outside the hospital. “Every week, it would stock the emergency ward with 50 stabbings and gunshot wounds.” Then he points to an old building with a rococo facade. “That’s the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was shot.”

Ondaatje sees the past under the surface οf things, like the forensic anthropologist in Anil’s Ghost, who unearths a skeleton from a Sri Lankan cave and runs her pen along the bones to show how they were twisted by fire. He is a poet and a novelist whose novels are often called poetic. “But I always think poetry is just the most precise writing,” he says. “What interests me is the poetry οf the skill – how things work, and how people work.” Whether writing about bomb disposal, bridge building or blowing a cornet, Ondaatje works his own skill like a jazz archaeologist, discovering the story by sifting through layers οf improvisation and research. He writes in secret, drafting his novels in an opaque scrawl and telling no one what they care about, not even his wife until they are done.

Out οf this private place, Ondaatje creates literary fiction with extraordinary resonance. The English Patient (1992) sold more than one million copies and inspired a movie that won nine Oscars, and its author became the first Canadian to win Britain’s Booker Prize. This year, Anil’s Ghost won four major awards, including the Giller and the Governor General’s. But for all his success, Ondaatje has stayed loyal to the community that nurtured him. In accepting the Giller, he deflected the spotlight to less celebrated writers, dedicating the award to novelist Carole Corbeil, who died in October. And with his wife, Linda Spalding, and her daughter, Esta – both accomplished authors –he still finds time to help edit Brick, an eclectic literary journal.

Ondaatje is our most international author. Quintessentially Canadian, his fiction deciphers identity and bleeds through borders. He writes with the compassion οf a literary peacekeeper, exploring the aftermath οf violence in narratives that telescope back through time. Disinterring bones and bombs, he is an author in search οf a history. His own began in colonial Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. The youngest οf four children, he moved to England with his family at 11, immigrated to Canada at 19. Now 57, Ondaatje – who has two grown children from his first marriage -calls Toronto home.

For the moment, though, he’s hanging out with doctors and students in Manhattan, as part οf a program called Narrative Medicine run by a physician, Rita Charon, who has pictures οf Henry James and Virginia Woolf on her office wall. (Diagnosis, she explains, is about listening to stories.) Ondaatje teaches one novel a week and brings in speakers such as author Joan Didion. One day, his guest is Dr. Michael Schull, Canadian president οf Doctors Without Borders, who tells tales οf moral intrigue from refugee camps in Bosnia and Bangladesh. Ondaatje, still the student, sits in the front row with his shoes off, listening with rapt attention.

The traditional Bildungsroman novel is autobiographical in form and displays similarities with the author’s own life, mostly with regard to childhood experiences. The novel displays a single individuals growth and development within the context οf a defined social order. In most cases, the protagonist is orphaned and experiences some form οf loss or discontentment in order to spur them away from the family home or setting. The education οf the main character is another aspect, which is crucial to their growth and development within the novel. It states in Todd (1980; 161) 1. that…

‘Ideally, Bildungsroman heroes, who continue to pursue their own adolescent ideals and inclinations, are expected to conform eventually to a predetermined identity and become integrated with the society whose values are creating and moulding them’.

Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations and described Pips childhood experiences in great detail. It has been argued that most οf the child characters Dickens portrayed in his novels resembled that οf his own childhood experiences. Like Pip, Dickens received very little in the way οf formal education.

Charlotte Bronte uses many similarities in Jane Eyre that could be argued to resemble her own experiences. She, too, like that οf Jane was the daughter οf a clergyman and was sent to a school called Norwood, which bares many similarities with that οf Lowood. She also became a governess, and this suggests that her own experience οf a middle-class working woman fighting to find a place in Victorian society was used to express her own views οf life in that οf Jane Eyre.

In Great Expectations, Pip is typical οf the main character in a Bildungsroman novel, as he is an orphan. Pip is brought up in a working-class environment with his older sister and her husband, Joe Gargery. Pip rejects Joe as a substitute father and looks on him as more οf a friend. This is evident in the passage when Joe states…’you and me are always friends’ (12; ch.2) 2. The absence οf a father figure for Pip reinforces the need for him to find some sense οf identity and to belong in society.

Works Cited

Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
Gordimer, Nadine. July’s People. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Hayles, N. Katherine. Chaos Bound. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.
Moses, Michael Valdes, “The Mark οf Empire: Writing, History, and Torture in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.” Kenyon Review. 15.1 (1993): 115-27.

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Truth and Justice in “Anil’s Ghost” by Michael Ondaatje

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